I Would Have Written to You

From Einsteins letter I learned that he had read my Stargazers
and Gravediggers. Actually I had not intended to show it to him: as
already said, on one of those two evenings in March when we read line
by line my "On the Four Systems of the World, and Miss
Dukas was present, I gave her the first file of those memoirs to read
in order to keep her awake. But Einstein read it as well; in the first
file the story is brought up to the time just before my parting with Macmillan.

A year earlier, upon reading the exchange of letters between Shapley
and the Macmillan Company, Einstein said that the material must be made
public but that somebody with dramatic talent should be entrusted with
the presentation of the story; now, upon reading the manuscript, he obviously
found that I had succeeded in the task.

The first folder of the Memoirs was returned to meseveral
of its sections were supplied with marginal notes by a pencil, not a sharp
pencil to boot. On the back of one of the pages with the story of Larrabees
article in Harpers, Einstein wrote:

I would have written to you: The historical arguments for violent events
in the crust of the earth are quite convincing. The attempt to explain
them is, however, adventurous and should have been offered only as tentative.
Otherwise the well-oriented reader loses confidence also in what is
solidly established by you.

If one should compare this evaluation with his own of 1946 ("Blamage
) or of 1950 or of 1952 or even of 1954, one must recognize how much
Einsteins attitude had changed. He did not protest any more or argue
against the events described, neither against the earth being disturbed
in its rotation, nor against the role ascribed to Venus; even more remarkable
was the fact that he no longer rejected outright the role of electromagnetism
in the events and thus, in the celestial sphere in general: he would only
have wished that I should not express myself with such finality. By this
he made it clear that the explanation which I gave to the events was not
undiscussablebut only that I should have offered it merely as a
hypothesis.

Strangely, one of Einsteins marginal notes to my chapter on Lafleur
agreed with the latters argument that the Earth is neutral because
of the behavior of the leaves of an electroscope touching the groundthey
do not diverge. To me it was clear that the behavior of the leaves does
not give an answer to the question whether or not the Earth is charged.
The Earth being charged in relation to the upper atmosphere, the lines
of force would pass in near-parallels vertically and, consequently, there
would be no divergence of the leaves of the electroscope. Nikola Tesla
was a great inventor, perhaps the greatest electrical engineer who ever
lived; he would not have asserted that the Earth is a highly charged body
if such a simple test with an electroscope could solve the problem. Actually,
there is a permanent stream of electrons flowing from the ground upwards:
it is calculated that between the feet and the head of a standing man
of medium height there is a 150 volt potential. The source of this stream
of electrons, or of the source of replenishment of the permanent discharge
of the Earth, is not known.

The question of whether the bodies of the solar system are charged or
not was from the beginning the question between Einstein and myself;
as he acknowledged in a marginal note to my letter of June 16, 1954, this
contention of mine was the main reason for the display of indignation
against myself and my work. On that page of the letter, as the reader
will remember, I offered a test to find whether or not the planetary bodies
are neutral. At that time, in the summer of 1954, Einstein did not undertake
anything in answer to my challenge and request; my offer to stake our
debate on whether Jupiter is a source of radio waves, he dismissed in
his marginal note, and I could not ask for the test againit was
the time when Einstein became sick, the sickness having kept him weak
through the entire fall. But when we parted close to midnight on March
11, after having spent two long sessions at a week interval reading my
essay, he said those words about the ability of a theory to predict and
see its prediction fulfilled.